Late at night in the office, the boss hands over …

Shen Ruotang never felt she needed to lean on anyone. In her early thirties, she was the sharpest knife in the planning department, able to spot the thread in the messiest data at a single glance. Her husband, Han Chen, worked at the same company—a quiet, steady engineer in the R&D department. Their marriage was a glass of tepid water, never scalding, but flavorless too. What she didn’t know was that the department head, Gu Yanzhou, had been watching her for a long time—a man who wore an easy smile on the surface but was, at his core, a calculating chess player. And tonight, he had finally decided to make his move.